Virginia and Hampton Roads rank among the worst in the nation for toxic chemicals in waterways, according to a report released Thursday by Environment Virginia.

The commonwealth is 5th worst for the amount of pollutants dumped into rivers and streams by industrial facilities, the report claims, while the lower James River is 9th worst among local watersheds for developmental toxins, such as arsenic and lead. The York River ranks 15th.

"Too often, our waters have become a dumping ground for polluters," Sarah Bucci of Environment Virginia Research & Policy Center said in a release announcing its "Wasting Our Waterways" report.

The center gathered its numbers from 2012 data that industrial facilities self-reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory.

The data is the latest available, and show that facilities released more than 11.8 million pounds of chemicals into Virginia waterways, behind Alabama (12.2 million pounds), Louisiana (12.6 million pounds), Texas (16.5 million pounds), and Indiana (17.8 million pounds).

Some 7,660 pounds of developmental toxins were released into the lower James, the report says, and 4,628 pounds into the York, contributing to the 3.23 million pounds of toxic chemicals that entered the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

"We have come a long way from the time when the river was an open dumping ground for pollutants, but there still is much work to be done," Leonard Smock, director of the Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a press statement.

The James is a major tributary of the bay, which at 64,000 square miles stretches from New York to Virginia and is the largest estuary in the country. The bay has also been badly polluted for years, and bay states are under a federal mandate to reduce pollution and sediment runoff and restore it by 2025.

Major sources of chemical discharges include power plants, pulp, paper and paperboard mills, slaughterhouses and poultry plants, according to the report. It said the biggest polluter in Virginia was the U.S. Army Ammunition Power Plant outside Radford, which released more than 7.3 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the Upper New River Waterway.

Across the country, the report says, some 206 million pounds of dangerous chemicals were released into waterways, including those that can cause cancer, reproductive problems, birth defects and infertility.

To curb pollutants, Environment Virginia wants the state to require safer alternatives to toxic chemicals and phase out the worst of them. It also wants the Obama Administration to finalize its proposed rule under the federal Clean Water Act that clarifies protections for seasonal upland streams — or those that only flow after a rain — and riparian wetlands.

The EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed the rule in late March. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy explained then the measure wouldn't protect any types of waters that haven't historically been covered under the act. But a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings and Bush Administration directives over the years created confusion about those protections and curtailed enforcement.

Homebuilder and agriculture groups object to the proposal, calling it a federal "land grab" that would increase the cost of new homes and hurt farmers.

The public comment period on the measure runs through Oct. 20.

Environment Virginia is also urging policymakers to require industries to report their toxic releases, including the chemicals that energy companies use in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to dislodge oil and gas from underground rock and shale formations. Companies resist full disclosure for proprietary reasons.

It also wants the public kept better informed about the storage of toxic chemicals.